Seda Manukyan, our Chess Club president and founder, is in her fourth and final year at Glendale High School, and she was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 2008. When Seda was young and living in Armenia, she had several hobbies, including painting and playing with her friends. When Seda was younger, she also wanted to be a famous artist. After she started attending school in 2015, when she was seven years old, she and her family moved to the United States.
When Seda moved from her home in Armenia to the United States, she first lived in Granada Hills, where she attended elementary school. Her family eventually decided to move to Glendale, where she went to John Marshall Elementary School and Wilson Middle School.
After Seda attended all of those schools, she came to her favorite school which is GHS. Since coming to high school, she has still maintained her love of painting, but she has now fallen in love with chess.
Last school year, Seda was home watching her father and her brother playing chess and started to enjoy the game as well. She started to learn chess by playing with her family members, and she says that chess helps sharpen her mind.
After all the time that Seda has played chess, she finally decided to create the Chess Club on our campus in January 2025, during her junior year. After she founded the club, many people started to join, and she felt happy about what she had done for her school community.
Seda says that everyone should join the Chess Club, because it is a place to make friends, and it is the best place to learn one of the greatest games in the world. She also explained that you don’t need to be a master player to be in the club, because she herself has just started to play chess.
After she is done with high school in the spring, Seda wants to go to her dream school of UCLA. She doesn’t know what she is going to study yet, but she has a base idea to go into STEM, more specifically, the medical field. She is really interested in human psychology and helping people in that field of work. She decided to go into this field, because she personally has a condition herself, and she wants to do research to help others like herself in the future.
Seda admitted that her mother is the person who most inspires her to reach for her goals, because she has seen her mother at her highest and lowest points. Through all of her struggles, Seda’s mother is still hard working and does everything she can to support her family.
If you are interested in joining the Chess Club at GHS, please contact their club advisor, Mr. O’Malley at [email protected]. Or follow them on Instagram: @chessclubghs!
